I’m a big movie guy (or if I am feeling extra pretentious on a given day, I’m a big cinema and film fan), and this site not only keeps me up to date with the latest news about upcoming films but it does so with fantastic humor and snark.

Hoping to ruin another American classic, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have announced to OK! magazine that they will be teaming up to remake Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Damon playing the Sundance Kid and Affleck playing Butch Cassidy. Though no reason is mentioned for why they would attempt to recreate the famous picture, nominated for 7 Oscars in 1970, I offer up this possibility: Brokeback Mountain wasn’t gay enough.

Bolding mine.

See what I mean? So do yourself a favor and make I Watch Stuff one of your daily visits.

If Steven Spielberg had made a fictional movie about the psychological disintegration of a revenge assassin, that would have been fine. Instead, he decided to call this fiction “Munich” and root it in a historical event: the 1972 massacre by Palestinian terrorists of 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games. Once you’ve done that — evoked the killing of innocents who, but for Palestinian murderers, would today be not much older than Spielberg himself — you have an obligation to get the story right and not to use the victims as props for any political agenda, let alone for the political agenda of those who killed them.

…

Munich, the massacre, had only modest success in launching the Palestinian cause with the blood of 11 Jews. “Munich,” the movie, has now made that success complete 33 years later. No longer is it crude, grainy TV propaganda. “Munich” now enjoys high cinematic production values and the imprimatur of Steven Spielberg, no less, carrying the original terrorists’ intended message to every theater in the world.

I have read well over 50 articles discussing this movie, and this pretty much ends it for me. I will not see this movie, at least not in the theaters. My concern has always been whether I would be able to overlook the distortion of history and politics in this movie to be able to enjoy it as if it were just a bit of thriller fiction.

I just can’t.

This isn’t playing loose and fast with things that happened so long ago that they don’t matter, like William Wallace impregnating the Princess of Wales in Braveheart. Many of those involved in this horrific event are still alive and they, much less the dead, deserve to have their stories told straight and not used as a prop for Speilberg to show us all how we can solve all the world’s problems if we just listen to him.

Definitely worth your time to read it all. It has the many trappings of a great article: historical reference galore and even an overarching Aesop’s Fable allusion.

— Ever since World War II, the German city of Munich has been symbolic of a single, solitary political lesson: the folly of “appeasement.” The 1938 Munich Pact represented the futility of compromising with evil. This was always a bit unfair to poor British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who had better reasons to sign on to the pact than most people remember. But the moral of the story was a good one, going all the way back to Aesop, who told the fable of the scorpion and the frog, which ends with the frog being shocked that the scorpion would sting him even though the scorpion could do nothing else, for that was its nature.

Hitler was a scorpion, and thinking or hoping otherwise wouldn’t change that fact. Much of the Cold War was predicated on this lesson, as the World War II generation agreed not to let down its guard ever again.

Steven Spielberg would like to rewrite the meaning of Munich. In his film about the response to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Spielberg seems determined to invest the word with a new meaning: We must not treat scorpions like scorpions.

I still don’t know whether or not I am going to see Spielberg’s Munich. While I have little doubts as to the technical merit of the film, meaning that it will have fantastic production value and be skillfully filmed, the story that Spielberg presents worries me. It seems conventional wisdom that the creator of Schindler’s List couldn’t possibly be converted to the dark side of the force, but then again, everyone agrees that Nazis are evil, while the vote is split on the Palestinians. Let’s face it, Jews of all political stripes play on the same team when it comes to WWII, but move forward more than 50 years and start talking about road maps and statehood and all of a sudden it’s skins versus shirts with conservative Jews on one side and liberal Jews on the other.

“On the gay cowboys eating pudding movie, you better go see it or it means you are a homophobic bigot. You aren’t a bigot are you? That at least seems to me the angle that the marketing of the movie is taking. Mainstreaming homosexuality by shaming you into supporting it. If that ain’t American, I don’t know what is. Heh.”